Instagram story viewer> @blackalderlabs> Posts

blackalderlabs

@blackalderlabs

237

followers

278

following

🧪 Narrative change & innovation lab building innovative tools and doing media and culture research

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

As America prepares to celebrate 250 years, from the pulpit to the headline, one question is being asked: Whose story gets told?

Today, Black Alder Labs launched Voices of Repair, a national campaign activating the Black Church, Black and allied media, and faith communities to push back against the narratives erasing Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from this nation’s history and future.

Through synchronized sermons, editorial content, journalism, and public conversation, faith leaders are centering repair not as politics, but as moral obligation.

It starts July 5th and it lasts all summer.

Learn more about the campaign at voicesofrepair.org

#voicesofrepair by @blackalderlabs

3

4

4 months ago

New research just dropped 📢

The Cost of the Story is the first official report from Black Alder Labs, created with support from the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at @borealisphilanthropy, and in collaboration with academic partners at West Virginia University’s College of Creative Arts and Media and American University’s School of Communication.

The report explores how trauma in journalism impacts both the people telling the story and the communities being reported on.

📊 Study 1: Take Care
A national survey of journalists that exposes the emotional and structural toll of covering trauma without support.

🗣️ Study 2: The Ripple Effect
In-depth interviews and focus groups with community members, organizers, and media professionals who live with the ripple effects of harmful coverage.

A few key findings:
• 75 percent of journalists who covered trauma have never received professional mental health support
• 32.9 percent say their newsroom provides no mental health resources at all
• Communities report being retraumatized, misquoted, or abandoned after coverage
• Black and Brown journalists are navigating personal grief while working in institutions that offer little to no care

Trauma-informed journalism is not a luxury. It is a responsibility.

This report calls for:
✅ Mental health support for journalists
✅ Trauma-informed training in newsrooms and J-schools
✅ Long-term relationships with communities
✅ Ethical storytelling that centers healing and consent

In Fall 2025, Black Alder Labs will launch a new curriculum on trauma-informed journalism, built directly from the findings of this report. The curriculum will include a certification program for journalists, editors, educators, and media advocates committed to reshaping newsroom culture and ethical storytelling.
Stay tuned…we’re just getting started.

🔗 Read the full report. Link in bio.

#BlackAlderLabs #TheCostOfTheStory #Journalism #MediaJustice #TraumaInformed #MentalHealthInMedia #NarrativePower #RacialEquityInJournalism by @blackalderlabs

3

3

a year ago

“The Black church carries a prophetic obligation to name harm and demand remedy.”

Chelsea Fuller and Takara Pierce issue this call as the Christian Nationalist Right uses America’s 250th anniversary to promote a White, heterosexual, wealthy, male, and Christian nation—while recruiting Black and brown Christians to support a vision that excludes them.

That recruitment is expanding because Christian Nationalism excels at making a exclusionary political project feel like an expression of communal faith.

Take, for example, a single working mother who has repeatedly heard that having children outside marriage is sinful. She may see her financial hardship as punishment for a moral failure—not as the result of low wages or unaffordable housing.

That explanation can obscure the structural forces shaping her life. It also can influence her beliefs about poverty, reproductive healthcare, immigration, and political leadership.

Fuller and Pierce argue that progressive narratives often focus on Christian Nationalism’s most extreme White evangelical expressions while missing how the ideology moves through Black and brown faith communities.

Christian Nationalism cannot be defeated only as a political ideology. It must also be confronted at its foundational storytelling about faith, suffering, and who belongs in America’s future.

✍🏽: Chelsea Fuller (@chelcglenn) and Takara Pierce (@takarapierce)
🔗: In bio and comments

#WeTheCivic #ChristianNationalism #BlackFaith by @blackalderlabs

77

1

2 months ago

When @joyannreid and her producers say your work is a palate cleanser, you know you’re doing good, positive work 🙂‍↕️

@liberationventures by @blackalderlabs

3

2

2 months ago

We are excited to join this incredibly dynamic panel for this year’s NABJ National Convention! by @blackalderlabs

27

1

2 months ago

The founders of Black Alder Labs are joining @joyannreid this evening to discuss this political moment, the Voices of Repair campaign, and more! Tune in! by @blackalderlabs

3

1

3 months ago

Join us today! Visit VoicesOfRepair.org to sign up! by @blackalderlabs

3

0

4 months ago

What does your faith tradition say about repair? by @blackalderlabs

3

0

4 months ago

Voices of Repair. Coming soon. by @blackalderlabs

3

0

4 months ago

This week, the #WeTheCivic narrative movement grows more powerful.

We are proud to welcome four organizations whose work reminds us that civic life is built not just in legislatures and town halls — but in courtrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, and communities fighting to be seen and heard.

@counterstream_media is a nonprofit media organization using journalism and storytelling to center the voices of frontline communities — especially Black, Indigenous, and communities of color — in the fight for climate and environmental justice. They don't just cover these stories. They shift who gets to tell them.

@law4blacklives is a national network of over 6,000 radical lawyers, law students, and legal workers of color building legal infrastructure that follows the lead of organizers — not the other way around. They are the Black femme-led legal arm of the Black liberation movement.

@blackalderlabs is a social impact lab developing innovative tools and practices to build narrative, social, and cultural power — including groundbreaking work on trauma-informed journalism and what it costs communities when their stories are extracted rather than honored.

@themavencollaborative works across the advocacy, research and narrative change spaces to create a different future. It imagines a world in which we all have what we need, where the only labor is that of love. Our worth is inherent, we are bound to each other by our human connection and not segregated by our perceived worth based on the market value of what we produce for others.

This is what civic power looks like. What coalition-building looks like.

We are honored to be in it together.

#WeTheCivic #America250 #solidarity #socialjustice #nonprofitleadership #blackleadership #powerbuilding by @blackalderlabs

18

4

4 months ago

@newsone_official covered our new report, The Cost of the Story. And as our co founder and co executive director, Takara, said, our call for care is not about comfort. It is not about making sure journalists feel cozy. It is about survival. It is about ensuring that this work is sustainable enough, ethical enough and protected enough for journalists to keep doing what democracy requires of them.

A press that is burned out and unsupported cannot stand as a bulwark against authoritarianism. A press that is cared for can.

We are not only losing journalists to layoffs or newsroom consolidation. We are also losing them because they are exhausted, burned out and carrying chronic stress shaped by repeated exposure to trauma. Our data shows this clearly.

The emotional and psychological toll is pushing people out of the field long before any official cuts reach them.

That is why we are excited to share that we are taking the findings of this report and building a full curriculum and certification for reporters, newsroom leadership, journalism schools, communicators and community media makers.

The goal is to strengthen the entire ecosystem by preparing people to do this work in a way that is grounded, sustainable and aligned with the ethical duty the press holds in a moment where democracy depends on it. by @blackalderlabs

3

0

a year ago

@teenvogue has been a home for some of the most critical stories of the past decade. As media strategists and storytellers, we are deeply saddened by this news. by @blackalderlabs

3

4

a year ago